Department of Deviance

Monday, May 22, 2017

While doing chores today at
the DoD satellite ag campus, we were struck by the idea that Normal has become
like Big Ag.It tends in various ways to
operate the way Big Ag does, most especially by its pronounced preference for
monocropping.Monocropping can have
certain advantages from a profit maximization standpoint.We here at the DoD satellite ag campus have
lots of field fescue and it is, to be sure, reliable and steady stuff for
making saleable hay.But you wouldn’t
want to monocrop farm fescue.

Different crops do different
work on the soil so the spectrum of nutrients a single crop represents will be
narrow and you risk wearing out your soil or needing chemical
supplementation.Monocropping will also
have all sorts of unintended consequences.Out here at DoD-Ag, for example, the quail population radically declined
with the influx of field fescue in the region – fescue grows in tight clumps
the quail can’t navigate to establish coveys.And perhaps most of all, Nature doesn’t much like monocropping so if you
want to keep out all her extras, you’re going to need lots of pesticides to
keep your fields free from deviant incursions.

That cluster of tall white-blooming growth is
hemlock, the historical enemy of deviants.
We here at DoD-Ag love variety, but all the same we’re not taking any
chances and are about to bushhog that pestilence down.

On our worst days, we think
Normal acts a lot like Big Ag.Many of
its formal structures and informal norms appear to favor monocropping:Its conferences, journals, and curricula
favor, sometimes insistently, uniformity, whether that be uniformity of
methodological approach, source materials, or demographic identities.Put more plainly, it excels at growing upper
class white heterosexual people, mostly men, who work with Normal sources using
“mainstream” methods.It also seems to
cyclically re-seed with more of the same, hiring most from a small clutch of
institutions, thereby performing something like a single-sourcing of each new
year’s crop.At its most aggressive, its
efforts at preserving the purported integrity of its monocrop can register like
aerial dusting of pesticide, a kind of indiscriminant removal of all that isn’t
fescue.At least it can sometimes feel
that way if you’re not part of the monocrop.

None of this is new.Small family farm types have been remarking
on it for years, objecting to the intellectual and demographic homogeneity of
Normal.But perhaps identifying Normal
with Big Ag is useful in illuminating the costs it incurs not to the individual
stray deviant plants but to the ecosystem.Ag polycultures work best over the long haul precisely because variety
and, dare we say, deviation, infuse vitality into growing processes.They prevent exhaustion of nutrients or, to
translate the analogy, a kind of boredom, stagnation, and endless stale repetition
of topics, approaches, and perspectives.What one sacrifices in reliability and familiarity, one gains in
variation and natural supplementation of nutrients that can make the whole show
better.

To be sure, polyculture
farming is more work.You have learn
about more than one crop to pull it off.And you have to tolerate some complexity rather than immediately reach
for the straightforward and easy.We
here at DoD-Ag are trying real hard to use manual control techniques rather
than chemical as we fight off a variety of plainly bad invasive species.That means lots of labor, but we’d rather not
kill off those walnut saplings when we take out the buckbrush.In similar fashion, we’re studying up on the
myriad possibilities for land use.So
too, if Normal could become less Big Ag, it would have to ensure its much
vaunted “standards” and “quality,” not by aerial dusting of the
“non-mainstream,” the “non-western,” and the “unpedigreed,” much less the
“non-white” or “non-male.” (So many “nons,” so little time!)It would also have to cultivate curiosity about
more than fescue and summon up some courage for novelty.

Friday, April 7, 2017

Eric Schliesser responded to
my post about the “problem of death” and raises issues that I can perhaps
elaborate upon.

One of the issues Schliesser
raises is that many philosophers “may well think that grief is best left for the
self-help section or the bio-chemical industry.”I think that perception correct, though I
despair of it.I once gave a talk at a
conference on death.The conference had
two full days of papers, with multiple sessions running concurrently.Mine was the only paper on bereavement.In the questions that followed, one colleague
asked skeptically, “But what is there to say about grief?It doesn’t seem there’s anything to say.”
Here are a few things I would say, in addition to what I’ve already said.

Schliesser catches a version
of my meaning by noting:“if we have lived well, our
deaths are not so much a loss to ourselves but a loss to our friends (and
community,) and loved ones. Saying you'll miss me when I am gone… may
well be the most truthful thing one can say about one's own death.”The Chinese philosophical version of this (and
my version) is stronger still.Where we
love our companions well and eschew that hopelessly, bloodlessly abstracted
individuated self so common to much philosophy, we recognize that the phenomenon
of death does not easily individuate.In
looking at those for whom I care, I can attest to myself:“You will take me out when you go.”On this, the best way to capture the
phenomenon is to appeal again to Zhuangzi and his reaction to passing his friend
Huizi’s grave.

The
friendship between Zhuangzi and Huizi is one of more enlivening and comic in
any philosophical corpus.They argue,
they contest, they quarrel.Huizi is
committed to logic while Zhuangzi regularly skewers him for this.They argue over whether fish can be called
happy, whether Huizi should better appreciate “useless” things, and when
Zhuangzi is widowed, Huizi arrives to comfort him, only to quickly descend into their familiar pattern of argument.It is an exquisite scene
for one feels that the best Huizi can do for Zhangzi in his grief is to
quarrel, their disagreement itself the consolation announcing that while
Zhuangzi has been fractured by grief, not all
is lost.Arguing with Huizi gives
purchase and stability where the ground has slipped from under Zhuangzi’s
feet.But here is what Zhuangzi says in
melancholy to Huizi’s grave:

There was a man of Ying who,
when he got a smear of plaster no thicker than a fly’s wing on the tip of his
nose, would make Carpenter Shi slice it off.Carpenter Shi would raise the wind whirling his hatchet, wait for the
moment, and slice it; every speck of the plaster would be gone without hurt to
the nose, while the man of Ying stood there perfectly composed.

Lord Yuan of Song heard about
it, summoned Carpenter Shi and said, ‘Let me see you do it.’ ‘As for my side of
the act,’ said Carpenter Shi, ‘I did use to be able to slice it off.However, my partner has been dead for a long
time.’

‘Since [you, Huizi,] died, I
have no one to use as a partner, no one with whom to talk about things’
(Graham, 124).

This is, I think, the most exquisite and concise statement of an
orientation ubiquitous in early Chinese philosophy:The sociality of persons is such that the
loss of intimate, beloved others constitutes a loss of self.We come to be selves by way of others and in dependence on those others.As Zhuangzi makes plain, even skills we
might incline to consider “mine” are shared, developed in relation with and to
others. So it is an altogether too
simple conception of skill and of human beings that would have us think
Carpenter Shi is, himself and by himself, the actor in wielding his ax.Likewise, Zhuangzi does not merely lose a
friend, nor merely a shared language of disputation in friendship, he loses
that Zhuangzi he can be with Huizi. Lest this seem an idiosyncrasy of early
Chinese philosophical views, this is caught in what is surely the most
melancholy poem of bereavement ever penned, W.S. Merwin’s “Elegy,”
which reads, in its entirety, “Who would I show it to?”This is
the poet gone mute without his reader, the poet who cannot write a poem and so be a poet without his reader.

If
selves are social, so will death be.Yes,
we “die alone,” in the altogether trivial sense that the biological phenomenon
of death happens to one.But no one
cares about this – it is not, in the phrase of Thomas Lynch, another poet, “the
death that matters.”Because the Chinese
philosophers took this seriously, they argued hotly and long about what to do in loss.Should one, as Zhuangzi implies, seek to
greet the radical fracture of self induced by loss by cultivating a capacity to
turn on a dime, developing a fluidity of self that accommodates change and
(tries to) resolve on cheerful, playful acceptance of one’s own transformations
in loss.Or, as the Confucians suggest,
ought one develop distinctively social mourning
practices that will place the bereaved in company with others in sorrow so that
reparative relation can close the perilous gap in self-understanding and personal
identity wrenched open by loss.These,
then, are some of the “things to say” on the subject about which some would
doubt there is anything to say. And they
cut right to the heart of how we understand personal identity.Such is to say that where personal identity
is concerned, me-without-you can, in
some relations, no longer be the meas was, nor will I be able to achieve
that future me-I-aspired-to-be
without you.If we want our accounts of
the self to have traction in lived experience, this, then, is something
formidable to consider.

I
confess that much of this, as I intimated in the original post, is so intuitive
to me that I struggle to articulate it other than evocatively.I find myself impatient with any philosophy
that fails to recognize that the lived experience of oneself is so tightly
wound into the well-being and continued existence of others that talk of any
self apart from this reads as utterly abstract fiction.I simply do not recognize anything of my own
experience in it, so perhaps I am constitutionally ill-equipped to make
philosophy of this, left as I am with conviction that cannot shift.And this is part of why I struggle to make
sense of philosophy that makes so much of my own end.

Relative
to my own, other deaths matter so much more in terms of how I will live and
understand myself.My parents are alive,
and when they die, I will live in a world I have never inhabited before, a
world in which I am orphaned and which, for me, is wholly unprecedented.I mercifully do not yet know any world that
does not have them in it, that does not have the me that is daughter-of-them in
it.The Confucians get this – this is
one reason Confucius observes that one of life’s most demanding experiences is the
deaths of one’s parents.For it is here
in human experience that one enters into the uncharted terrain that lies beyond
all of the maps of experience one has already constructed.However difficult this stands to be, there is
of course worse.Consideration of some
deaths utterly transforms thought of my own death into an affirmative good I
can embrace without reservation.Put
less obliquely, I will count it the finest piece of good fortune to die before
my daughter does. In any reflections on
deaths that matter, thinking of hers is one from which I so utterly flinch that
I will say no more.Suffice it to say
that what I prize in philosophers such as the early Chinese thinkers is that
they exhibit a finely wrought understanding of the fragility of the self.They speak to a self that can be shattered,
and speak of what this means to us, and about how we might pick up the shards
and carry on as life demands we must.

It is
true that one can retrieve commentary about grief and even some consolatory
philosophy out of the western tradition.I do not deny this.However, one
must retrieve it.It is not typically there on the surface.The few who are on available on the surface
are too often committed to identifying relationships with others as “external
goods.”So for consolation we could turn
to Stoics who compare friends to tunics that get stolen and must be replaced
(Seneca), or one’s own children to vases that can break (Epictetus), even as
some of them (Seneca!) can’t quite seem to persuade themselves of this.We can look to philosophers who characterize
friendship as a skill (several of the ancient Greeks and Romans) that one
exercises and so retains even in grief, though this again declines to imagine
skills as seated and sourced in more than an individual agent.We can hypothesize that Plato writes his
sorrow into and through the dialogues, with these as memorializations ruefully
written into the silence of Socrates’ voice and the impossibility of Socrates
making any response.We can even
excavate the slight and subtle signs that much lies under the surface, asking,
for example, why, if Socrates wants to liken the body to a cage, he couples
saying so with affectionately touching one of his interlocutors, a bodily gesture that may say much.And of course we do have Montaigne, though
not enough read him.Montaigne is, from
what I have read, the closest we come to courting the idea that bereavement may
do much to unsettle the human being and, along the way, longstanding ideas
about personal identity.But, again, few
read Montaigne.

My
point is not that the western canon is without resources, but that one has look
harder than one ought to find them. They
must be retrieved and sometimes excavated from the barest indications. The ones easy to find are works that I at least judge insensate to how I in fact live. To me, this intellectual poverty reads as testament to an
impoverished tradition for addressing the complexities of the self, or at least
the self that actual people walk
around with. Should philosophers care that people do not live like the
entities described in our philosophies?
Obviously, I think we should. But
I think that means we need to care about bereavement. I said that philosophy should help – I do think, perhaps archaically,
that philosophy ought equip us to reflect upon and manage well common human
struggles – but let me emphasize the obverse of this coin for the skeptical. Philosophy itself will not be very good if it
cannot entertain the complexity of experiences people attest to finding
exceptionally complex where their lived personal identities are concerned. It likewise will not be very good if it
decides, in advance of substantive inquiry, that we can learn nothing from one
of the most significant and painful experiences in human life, bereavement.

For
what it’s worth, the early Chinese sources do suggest that the Chinese
philosophers themselves did die well, in line with the courage and equanimity we see in figures like Socrates.Tellingly,
though, this just isn’t counted a very interesting aspect of who they were, how
they lived, or what constitutes their wisdom.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Digging a grave is not like
digging a hole.Some of the difference
is quickly discovered.A grave wants to
be tidy, the sides cut smooth and corners keen.The work is careful, not quick, and it is much physically harder than I
expected.For in digging I discovered
why the cemetery sits where it does on our family farm.It rests on a rise of land overlooking an
expanse of lower pasture and, beyond that, hills that push away west and show
the last of the sun in evening.It’s
beautiful, yet this is but coincidence.The cemetery sits where it does because its soil is so leavened with
rock as to make farming untenable.This,
then, is the prudent logic of location in the always sorry economics of
farming.We bury our dead in our
loveliest spot, but this is because we bury them in the worst of our dirt.

In digging, I remembered too
well that tombstones have purpose beyond serving sentiment.We mark graves to announce human significance,
the tombstone a tangible sign that our dead lived and we rued their loss.But we also mark graves for the ones who must
dig next.My grandfather recalled his
boyhood experiences digging graves in our cemetery, with its several unmarked
graves. What stones there were for these were long ago lost, so “sometimes,” my grandfather would say, “we’d
be digging and hit coffin, and we’d have to move over and start again.”An unmarked grave evokes sorrow for dead
completely forgotten, but it also makes potential trouble for the next
gravedigger.When I dug a grave, I hoped
against this trouble.

But grave digging just is
trouble, and trouble of the worst sort. Grief
is dirty and it is work.One doesn’t
want it easier – that just seems, as Dostoyevsky might say, false to the fact –
but help would be nice.

I’ve always thought that
whatever else philosophy does, it should help.I expect many people have thought so, but the
ones we study most are little help with grave digging.To be sure, they have much to say about
death.Philosophy itself, if we heed
Plato, is training for death, the mental discipline that readies its practitioners
to die well, without fear and anxiety.Plato was schooled in this by Socrates, that philosopher whose death
perhaps marks the genesis of all philosophy in the west.Socrates died with fierce defiance – of the
shortsighted contemporaries who persecuted him, but more ambitiously of death
itself.He would not fear it, insisting
instead upon the power of reason to overmaster anxiety.But he is not a philosopher with whom I could
bear to dig a grave.

Much of philosophy in the
west simply takes it as obvious that the problem of death is that I will
die.It was so for Socrates and Plato,
and remains so now:Pick up any recent
philosophy collection on death and you will find much to school you on your own
end, much that will work away at whether you ought count your death bad and
attempt to sort your mortality into rational order.For in most of our philosophy still, the
death that matters is your own.This is why
most philosophers would make poor gravediggers, poor companions in grief.

I will die – of course I will
– and I suppose that represents a challenge of sorts.But the problem I have with death is that other people die.Whatever trouble my own death poses is but
dull afterthought to more potent longings against loss.Where one wants help with this, one must look
elsewhere, to poets, memoirists, or novelists.If one wants a philosopher, though, best look to China.There one finds philosophers who feel the
trouble of graves.

When Confucius buried his
parents, he built a mounded grave, one that would be visible and stand above
its surrounds.Great care was taken to
build it well, for its height would be the way he would find it again when he
would wish to return.The fates were
against him, however, and under the weight of uncommonly heavy rains, the mound
collapsed.When his students informed
him of this, they had to repeat the news three times, Confucius unable to take
it in.As understanding broke upon him,
he wept openly, wrecked by the failure to make some modest symbolic good out of
sorrow.

In my own digging, I felt the
force of Confucius’ distress.One wants
so badly in grief to exercise what pitiably small control one can, to make
something go right where all has gone wrong.So too, one wants to do for the dead, not because they’ll know what we
do in laying their graves, but because it feels, however modestly, something
like life once did.When they lived, the
dead took what we could offer – conversation, affection, shared experiences –
and they gave back in kind.Death puts
them beyond reach of our doings, but in mourning we pledge ourselves against
this, telling the fates that not all is altered.We hold in remainder the power to do for them
just a little bit more and a little bit longer.And, since it is all we can do, we want this bit of doing to go right
and well.To have it go badly or, worse,
to have failed to make our efforts the best we could, is to suffer a redoubling
of loss.

The Daoist Zhuangzi is in
many ways a foil to Confucius.He describes
sages cheerfully singing beside the corpse of a dead friend, reveling in
nature’s endless transformations.Sometimes
he rejected the idea of graves altogether, suggesting that burying the dead but
arbitrarily favors worms over birds as nature has her way with our
remains.Zhuangzi’s happy sages come to
prize death precisely because they prize life, understanding that change,
including the dramatic change of death, is where we find whatever beauty,
interest, and meaning life can afford.Without it, much that makes our happiness would be lost.Still, even Zhuangzi could not pass the grave
of a friend without melancholy.Seeing
his companion Huizi’s grave, he speaks to Huizi, ruefully observing that he now
has no one with whom to talk.

Zhuangzi’s vision of a world
without graves is tempting, as if giving up the burial of our dead could lay to
rest our grief.It would also be a
valuable admission of human vanities, a check on all the ways we strive to make
monuments in life and out of our lives.Efforts to make that which will last are a folly in defiance of how the
world works, its endless capacity to forget and, in the dreadful phrase, “move
on.”But even Zhuangzi saw the wide
difference between vainly heroic aspirations to defy mortality through our
memorializing actions and wishing one’s own dear friend was not dead.In the latter, one cares not about monuments
to human significance, but about the lost chance to have one more ordinary
word.A grave can’t fix this, but it gave
Zhuangzi a place to talk when death had shut the ears of the one he wanted to
listen.However sorry a substitute, a
grave may save the interchange between friends from becoming a dead
language.Or, at least, provide a place
to speak of languages lost.

Another Confucian, Xunzi,
meditates on the problems our dead present as corpses.Dead bodies are not like living bodies, but
neither are they terribly different when they belong to one’s own.We want to keep our dead, save them from the
nullity of death, even as the blunt facts of decay insist that we must take
leave.The trouble then is how to
balance longing with fact, how to separate ourselves from what used to be when
the present is emphatically not as we would wish.Xunzi apprehended that where death is quick,
leave-taking wants to be long.Our
efforts at tending our dead, digging their graves, and ritual exercises of
remembrance are actions undertaken in the gap, the gap between what has
happened and our hesitant, unwilling adjustment to it.We need to do something, so we do what we can
to make it seem as if they recede from view rather than bluntly disappear:We dig, we weep, we memorialize.In this, Xunzi understood the irrelevance or,
perhaps more kindly, impotence of the merely doxastic in taking leave of our
dead.What we believe about our dead
matters far less in grief than what we do.

Like many contemporary
philosophers, Xunzi assumed that the dead are just that – gone, from us, from
life, from existence. But Xunzi did not
imagine that this stone cold fact signified much.Fact pales before desire and desire wants
translating into action, into doing. In early China, one form of doing was the
soul-summoning ritual. Upon the death of
a beloved, the bereaved would take to the rooftop to beg their dead to return –
ritually pleading, “Come back!” – no matter
how impossible one knew this to be.Because, Xunzi might say, the longing is the thing.What matters most is not that our dead cannot
come back to us but the helpless, hopeless, and most important desire that they
could.The wish too is a fact and it is
one of the more exquisite human facts, the felt power of our longings to go on
a little longer with those we love.If
we are not to be false to this more important fact, we need somewhere to go
with it, to give it its due, and the rooftop seems as good a place as any.As does the graveyard, digging through layers
of rock to make a place that is not a hole.

As
I age and accrue the losses that age brings, philosophers who think
their own deaths the most challenging breed in me a certain contempt. People
like mine, who historically lacked the leisure for philosophy, have long died
stoically themselves but only uneasily bury their own in country cemeteries,
graves we’ll also maintain if they are to be maintained. People like
mine do not so much dispose of the dead but hold them in our
charge. And this perhaps works a fundamental difference in
consciousness of death. When I die, my kin will bury me alongside
our other dead. They’ll sing “I’ll Fly Away,” even as I lay
manifestly grounded beneath the rocky soil, because announcing that melancholic
hope is what we have always done, and done most when we believe it
least. And, at long last, mine will be one more grave alongside
which they'll picnic on Decoration Day, perhaps sometimes sparing my grave a
lonely word. In all of this, for me, my own death really figures
little. I’ll not be doing anything in dying my ancestors have not
already done. Its banality is the consolation, if some is needed.

The
trouble I discern is that the death that matters to me is not my own. It does not sit
on a distant horizon, nor will its coming be singular. It will instead
come and keep coming, a serial experience belonging to me by way of
others I would not lose if I had power. The problem isn’t death, but
deaths. It is not dying, but grave digging, and that requires raw
and muscular work too easily lost in philosophy’s most indolent abstractions.
To grieve and mourn, one does not want those who will too
ably measure and make tidy life’s alarming collapses. One wants
philosophers who fall apart, who come undone with weeping, talk to graves, and
cry out for the return of souls that don’t exist. One
wants those who tarry in the trouble because they feel it and know it has no
ready resolution.If it will ever yield
to reason and reflection, these will come late and incompletely, and only after
digging is done.